Gil Friend is President and Chief Executive Officer of Natural Logic, Inc., a strategy and systems development company that helps companies and communities prosper by embedding the laws of nature at the heart of enterprise. Tomorrow Magazine called him "one of the country's leading environmental management consultants -- a real expert who combines theoretical sophistication with hands-on, in-the-trenches know-how."

A systems ecologist and business strategist with 35 years experience in business, communications and environmental innovation, Friend combines broad business experience with unique content experience spanning strategy, systems ecology, economic development, management cybernetics, and public policy. "Nature's ecosystems have spent 3.85 billion years building efficient, complex, adaptive, resilient systems," he observes. "Why should companies reinvent the wheel, when the R&D has already been done?"

He was a founding board member of internet pioneer Institute for Global Communications, and played key or founding roles in such seminal environmental enterprises as EcoNet, GreenLine, the California Office of Appropriate Technology, Turner Broadcasting's Planet Live, University of California's AgroEcology Program, and Buckminster Fuller's "World Game." He was co-founder and Co-Director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, one of the nation's leading urban ecology and economic development "think-and-do tanks," pioneering the "green roof" trend 30 years ago.

Friend writes The New Bottom Line, a monthly column on business strategy, the Ask the Experts column at GreenBiz.com), a Sustainability Sundays column for WorldChanging.com, and a weblog on strategic sustainability and other matters of interest. He holds an MS in Systems Ecology from Antioch University, a black belt in Aikido, and is a seasoned practitioner of "The Natural Step" environmental management system.